Mountain Man (Book 5): Make Me King

by Blackmore, Keith C.

  That little bit of knowledge didn’t do anything for him, either. He knew the leather freaks had weapons, but he was hoping to pick up something along the way. As special with a weapon Collie might be, he didn’t think she was capable of squaring off against a small pack of gunmen with just her prized Sig.

  Collie held up a hand and Gus stopped.

  She reached down and picked up a battle rifle, much like the ST1X he’d used earlier, but a much smaller design.

  “KR3,” Collie whispered. She inspected the empty magazine. “Dry, though.”

  “What’s a KR3?”

  “Belgian ball breaker. Medium-range bang stick for security forces. Not quite frontline, but it’ll rip you a new one just as fast. Bet they left this one because it was empty. Mine now.”

  She holstered her Sig and braced the KR3 against her shoulder. “I like the old German-made HKs myself. But that’s pillow talk.”

  Gus smiled uncertainly.

  “Now,” she said, studying the floor. “If we can just find a magazine. Full or partial is fine by me.”

  “This place is a grave, Collie.”

  But she didn’t comment. She crept down the corridor, staying quiet, and Gus tried to emulate her. He got the quiet part down, but Collie was outpacing him as if she were levitating over the bodies. A short distance away, she eased herself into a section with no lighting overhead. Gripping his bat, Gus followed.

  In that pocket of darkness, Collie crouched and searched a body. When Gus got close, she held up a straight magazine so that he could see it.

  Then she loaded it into her weapon, readying it with a metallic snap.

  They pushed on, exiting the dark area in silence. Up ahead they saw the open doorway, and the bodies preventing it from closing.

  Collie dropped to a crouch and, without looking, wiggled a few fingers at Gus for him to get down. She then took aim.

  Gus hung back behind her, holding onto his bat, watching her. Collie’s back, his brain shrieked, overjoyed. His heart was racing. She was becoming like Wallace, however, and that chummed his initial rush of happiness into a pulp of uncertainty. He glanced at the dead bodies nearby, then at Collie. The thumping in his chest grew all the stronger. A coldness gripped his innards and gave them a painful squeeze.

  Becoming like Wallace.

  He remembered Wallace.

  Collie suddenly fired, and tracers scorched through shadows. A dark figure Gus had missed entirely flew backwards as if yanked by an invisible cane. Collie crouched lower and fired two more bursts. Someone croaked a note of pain, as if jamming a toe into the corner of a couch. A figure flopped facedown and didn’t move.

  Collie advanced, staying low, weapon leveled and ready.

  Gus lurched after her, his grip tight around his baseball bat.

  They reached the open doorway, and Collie fired again. Someone fell in the corridor beyond.

  Then bullets screamed back.

  Collie pressed herself against the wall, behind a section of steel girders bowed like whale bones. She squeezed herself in tight, while Gus fell on his chest—right behind two corpses lying on another soldier.

  “Stay where you are,” she ordered, before spinning around. Bullets ricocheted off steel, exploding like aerosol gas cans chucked into a fire.

  Collie shot one gunman through the face.

  She nailed another through the chest, whipping the black-vested torso around before blowing out the back of his head—and the front of his face.

  A third Leather sprayed and prayed, sticking his weapon around a girder while remaining undercover. Collie adjusted her fire with a click, took quick aim, and removed one hand at the wrist.

  That got the shooter screaming.

  He lumbered away, and Collie let him go. Chrome flashed beneath a spinning red emergency light. Into that, she advanced, just a few steps inside the open doorway. Gus looked up in time to see more of those Halloween freaks creeping up the corridor, emerging from around corners and leapfrogging from steel rib to rib, towards the two of them. They fired as they advanced.

  Collie squeezed herself behind a support strut. She hunkered down, presenting a small target, and didn’t retreat despite the approaching shadows. She leaned out and killed the two attackers, violently lighting both targets up, before ducking behind the curved strut.

  Whereupon she placed her KR3 down and smoothly extracted her Sig.

  She cocked her helmet at Gus, as if this was just a regular day at the office. He smiled back, but it was brief. He crawled ahead, over dead things, and reached the door.

  Where he saw the thing keeping the door open.

  The barrel of an automatic rifle.

  The exact kind Collie had used.

  But the weapon was in a slotted groove, suggesting that if he took the damned thing, the door might close. Collie didn’t need a new rifle, however. She needed ammunition. He pawed at the bodies, forcefully shoving them forward, creating a low barrier of sorts. He needed to know if the weapon was the same as hers. When he pushed the last body onto its side, his face lit up… for about two seconds. He realized more work would be needed to extract the magazine.

  Because he didn’t have a clue.

  Ahead, Collie whirled and fired two shots.

  Someone fell. Others took cover. There were plenty of wraiths filling the corridor, however—moving, shifting, pressing ahead with grim concentration, firing as they advanced before taking cover behind the many steel ribs holding up the ceiling.

  Collie shot a calf sticking out from behind one of those ribs, and as the guy pitched forward, she finished him off with a bullet to the face. Another stepped around a strut, and Collie shot him twice, driving him back where he fell, both ankles fluttering in the air.

  But those masked crazies did not relent.

  Daring not to lift his head, Gus’s fingers hooked and clawed at metal. He found a short, rectangular switch and tweaked it left and right before finally shoving it upward.

  The magazine cleared.

  Gus pulled it free.

  “Collie,” he called out over a frenzied burst of return fire. He held up the magazine as far as he dared.

  Then he tossed it at her.

  Collie caught the magazine, checked it, and put away her sidearm before going for the KR3. She inserted the mag, readied the weapon, and paused for a few split seconds.

  Then she returned fire.

  There were no bursts this time, just the surgical snap of a trained marksman with battle experience.

  In seconds, she gunned down four more targets.

  “Thanks,” she said, before whirling around the girder and storming ahead.

  Gus jumped up and rushed to her last place of cover.

  *

  Gunshots rang out from beyond the missile room—or what the Bronze thought of as the missile room. The concerning thing was the storm of gunfire—a devastating hail of killer shot that lit up the red-shaded corridor like spent chain lighting…

  Then nothing.

  And no more than two seconds later, the return fire commenced.

  Grunts of pain percolated the air, and those sounds were brief and final.

  After the first few rounds of gunfire ceased, the Leather remaining with the Bronze were impassive, their masks hiding all emotion. They were hunched over and waiting to enter the fight, having discarded their crossbows for more modern weaponry.

  During the next volley of intense gunfire—an exchange resulting in even more deaths—the Leather still didn’t show any emotion, although frustration was bubbling within the Bronze.

  Another extended exchange of bullets, and more of the Leather cried out in pain, further breaking their inhuman silence that made them so unnerving.

  That resulted in a few looks from those within the missile room. Rifles were hefted a little higher. A head turned here and there. One individual rolled his shoulders before glancing nervously about.

  All the while, the raging firefight drew closer.

  Leather-clad
gunmen came into view then, turning the far corner, firing as they retreated.

  Retreated. They were retreating. Worse still, there were only a handful.

  The Bronze’s eyes narrowed.

  He’d sent almost two dozen Leather into the corridor.

  His hand tightened upon a formidable machine-gun pistol he’d acquired in the missile room, a short-barreled monster that he had chosen over his axe. The executioner’s weapon rested against a desk.

  Outside, even though the Leather had taken cover in amongst those thick steel supports, the advancing shooter had still managed to score hits.

  A Leather had his head torqued to the left in a shocking burst of gore, and the rest of him collapsed in a heap on the metal floor. Another Leather took a shot dead-center, was backed up to a wall, only to have his throat blown out in an awful smack of bone against metal. One of the minions placed his back against the bulkhead and then stuck only his rifle out into the corridor, firing blindly at the unknown assailant. He emptied the weapon and pulled back to reload—when a single shot ricocheted off the opposite wall in a frightening spark. The Leather’s unprotected head snapped back in a bloody puff of skull matter.

  That unnerved the onlookers in reserve, causing several of them to visibly flinch.

  They were being routed. And in the narrow confines of the corridor, they were being routed back into the missile room. That simply would not do. The side passage to the armory was thirty feet away. If the Leather lost that, then they would lose everything else.

  But who was killing them off so damn easily?

  The Bronze was a heavy. A back breaker. A snapper of spines and a hacker of heads. He was a harbinger of terror, held in the same terrible esteem as the Dog Tongue’s dreaded Inflictors. No task was out of the question. Nothing scared him. Nothing disturbed him.

  But damn if he wasn’t feeling uneasy at that exact moment.

  He considered one of the Leather, the one that had picked up the small grenade. He strode across the floor and grabbed the man’s coat. The Bronze forcefully extracted the grenade from the minion’s pocket and shoved him away. With grenade in one hand and machine cannon in the other, the tall masked man marched into the corridor.

  It was time to end this firefight, before he lost the rest of his pack.

  *

  After her dazzling trick shot, Collie took cover behind a strut and shook her head at Gus. He’d seen what she’d done, even saw the dead-arm flop and body-drop after that killer spark of a ricochet.

  What was it that Wallace had said about Collie? Gus couldn’t remember exactly, but it was frightening. Gus knew what she was capable of with a knife. And a rifle for that matter.

  They were perhaps twenty strides from a corner, and the corridor around them was choked with the long-since departed and the more recently dead. Collie had already swapped her weapon out twice, picking the rifles off the floor from where their dead owners lay. Gus was on his feet, peering ahead and behind, in case one of the masked fuckers might’ve been playing dead. He didn’t think they were, but he had to do something to make himself useful, even if was just being ready to smack a bastard upside the brain pan. Collie was using the fallen rifles as she advanced, but there weren’t any more. Not that he cared. She was a fucking Olympian when it came to shooting.

  “Gus,” she said, after her last shot. “Stay behind me, okay? We’re heading for that corner. That’s where the armory is, and the war room after that.”

  “Where the nukes are?”

  “Yeah, but don’t worry. They can’t do anything with them. There are codes and keys, which they don’t have. Not yet, anyway, but if we let these fucking chuggernuts root around down here long enough… you never know what shit they might get up to.”

  She let that thought go.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  Gus nodded.

  She held up a hand and counted down on her fingers. Three, two, one…

  She stepped out around the bulky rib of the corridor and immediately had her ankle grabbed by one of the not-so-dead freaks upon the floor. The action was so startling, so unexpected, that it caught both of them completely off-guard. She twisted in that grip, slipped, and fell. Gus froze for all of a split second, wavering on what to do.

  Just as the tall menacing shade that might’ve just been released from a medieval dungeon stepped out into the open.

  With his arm cocked back, poised to throw.

  50

  The Bronze threw the grenade.

  51

  In that whirling klaxon of red light, the black ball hurtled forward. It was considerably smaller than a zombie’s head, and it was moving much faster than Gus would have liked.

  He knew what it was.

  What it had to be.

  And that unlocked his split-second paralysis.

  Acting on reflex alone, he rushed forward—and swung his bat.

  And connected, sending that explosive nugget back towards its owner just as the figure darted back behind the corner.

  The grenade bounced off the wall.

  *

  And landed right at the feet of the paralyzed Bronze, and the remainder of his forces.…

  *

  The explosive detonated in a dragon’s belch of fire.

  A flashing gout of flame and smoke filled the corridor in an instant, swamping it with raging heat. The force flung Gus backwards, but even as he was falling, he glimpsed the charred husks and body parts of dead men bouncing off the corridor walls.

  Then he was flat on his back and gasping.

  52

  His ears rang, a pure bell tone that seemed to stretch its note forever.

  Collie loomed over him, gripping his shoulder. She was shouting, but he didn’t hear anything.

  Then she stood back and fired at something on the floor, one short burst that startled him.

  Not waiting around, she strode forward, towards that rolling cloud of smoke.

  And just like that, she was gone.

  The ringing in his ears died away, and Gus closed his eyes.

  *

  A shuffling presence summoned him back. A buckle came undone, and there was a strained grunt, followed by the ripping of a shirt. It wasn’t his, though, but that sound of fabric being torn asunder was close.

  Gus opened his eyes. Turned his head.

  Collie was there, black-eyed and savage, with a beard of gore dripping off her pale face, lowered over one of those masked men.

  She felt his stare and glared his way.

  Gus’s eyes closed again, but he heard her frenzied scrambling to get to him. A second later, he felt her bloody breath on his face.

  *

  “You okay?” she asked.

  Gus came to and cringed, seeing her without her helmet, her face less than a foot away from his.

  “Do I look that bad?” she asked.

  No gore dripping off her chops. No wild look.

  “You look fine,” Gus replied.

  “I don’t feel fine. But, guess what?”

  “What?”

  “We’re still alive.”

  Those words sank in.

  “We’re still alive,” Gus agreed dreamily.

  Collie reached out and placed a palm on the side of his battle helmet.

  Gus covered her hand with one of his own.

  53

  Some time later, Collie and Gus returned to Whitecap’s decontamination zone, where they relieved Carson of his guard duty. They were surprised to see that the crippled man had passed out from his pain, his weapon resting on the floor. Milo “Top Gun” Trasher was sitting just across from him, and he actually greeted Gus and Collie upon their return.

  When asked why he didn’t try to escape, Milo shrugged and answered, “Got no place to go.”

  Milo was later escorted under guard to a nearby cellblock, where he agreed to remain as sole occupant. Along the way, he didn’t protest or complain. Instead, he apologized for shooting Collie, and for firing on their group back on th
e highway, back at the recharging station.

  They left him sitting on a bunk with a blanket and a crapper clean enough to drink from. Or so Gus thought.

  Bruno, Cory, little Monica, and the rest of the islanders never made it out of Whitecap. They met up with Collie and Gus at the storeroom on the fifth level, but upon opening the outer hatch, a steady stream of water flowed in from the opening. That elicited an “Oh yeah” moment from Collie. She went on to explain that the passageway led up under a small pond. Nothing so bad to flood the tunnel, but enough to hide the exit. She figured the seals must have leaked over time.

  Which she later apologized for forgetting to point out.

  Upon securing the missile room and the nearby armory, Collie met with a delighted Rogan. Gus wasn’t present when they talked, guessing it was secret government shit, but since he knew about the nukes, he wondered what other secrets Whitecap might be hiding.

  That night, however, Collie elected to return to her home, or what was her home, in the living quarters sector of the bunker. She didn’t invite Gus, nor did he ask to join her, as much as he wanted. That place was hers and Wallace’s, and he wasn’t about to disrespect the operator’s memory by sleeping with his wife, in what was once their bed.

  There were plenty of other places to sleep for the night.

  Carson was taken to a nearby infirmary and given enough painkiller to drop a bull. Whitecap’s other guests had much more comfortable accommodations. The islanders were assigned their own rooms for the night, along a street that resembled a narrow back road in the country, complete with a mix of real and artificial greenery. As added security, if folks wanted, they could lock their doors. Collie encouraged it, in fact. Just to be on the safe side.

  Gus left his room unlocked, and slept on a couch, not wanting to sleep in another person’s bed, even though the home was relatively well kept. He supposed that would change in time, if he chose to live here. That got him thinking about what would happen to the place.